20 Years Collaboration with ECSN

Success Story

Summary

We are pleased to announce 20 years of successful partnership with the Elections Canada Support Network(ECSN). The teams on both sides of the ocean have built up excellent cooperation to support the information system serving the Canadian federal elections.

HelpVisiion Success Story

Elections Canada Support Network: a HelpVisiion Success Story

Sirma team has successfully collaborated with WorkLogic Canada since 1997, and their partnership has resulted in deployment of WorkLogic.com’s HelpVisiion product (HV) at ECSN for Canadian federal elections in November 2000.

“We think that the main factor for the success of the HV3-ECSN project was this close collaboration and the unprecedented level of support that WorkLogic provides to its clients. Thanks to all the team both in Ottawa and Sofia, the project was a team effort between vendor and client, and at the end it was a resounding success.”

The challenge

Elections Canada (EC) contacted WL at the beginning of the year 2000 regarding a possible deployment of HV for the purposes of ECSN: providing support to returning officers, their staff, and drop-in clients from the general public during the November 2000 federal election. The EC had ran a HV pilot in the EC Public Support Network to determine the fit of HV for ECSN.

While pleased with the results of the pilot, the EC also listed a number of enhancements they needed to be implemented in HV before it could be used for ECSN. Based on the technical strength of our response and initial drafts of enhancement specifications that followed, ECSN decided to go with HV, and so EC and WL entered into a HV procurement and enhancements contract in February 2000.

The project stages

WL completed a specification of the required enhancements by the end of February. After seeing the depth and technical soundness of that specification, and given all the other pressures that ECSN had with setting up networks, hardware, and other support systems, EC was more than happy to let WL run the project with little supervision. The team delivered the enhancements on time in August 2000. The HV3 enhancement project is a shining example of WorkLogic’s ability to deliver functional enhancements on time and to the client’s satisfaction.

During the late stages of the project (after most functionality enhancements were complete) we sent a load testing and performance optimization specialist on-site to ECSN to ensure the system’s performance on ECSN hardware and under the expected concurrent user load and volume of requests.

HV proved an extremely stable system. ECSN used HV for 16 hours a day, every day for the 36 days of the election, with 200 to 350 concurrent users, without requiring a single reboot or restart of the system. The performance of HV was also very good, with typical response times of under 1s, and filter response times of under 3s. ECSN accumulated approximately 40,000 requests during their deployment, of which roughly 30,000 were entered during the 36 days of the election. ECSN did not experience any adverse effect as a result of this large volume of requests.

The outcome

ECSN’s deployment was not only large (350 concurrent users), but also complicated. Before the start of the election, ECSN entered into an additional contract with WL to provide an on-site technical support person for the duration of the election, and 24 hours per day on-call service. Overall, ECSN was very happy with the performance of HV and with the support that WL provided.

„It was indeed a success: HelpVisiion did not fail us and it will be considered as one of the things that worked well during this event. Thanks to all the team both in Ottawa and Sofia, WorkLogic works very closely with its clients to make sure that they are happy. We listen to our clients, and try to implement every enhancement that they request, or else to find an alternative way to accomplish what they need. We have very capable analysts and developers who can take a statement of client’s needs, turn it into a specification for generic enhancements to a baseline product, and run it successfully“.